Posted
by
timothyon Saturday November 17, 2012 @05:40PM
from the time-enough-for-love dept.

First time accepted submitter mbeckman writes "A man was arrested at Oakland airport for having bomb-making materials. The materials? An ornate watch and extra insoles in his boots. Despite the bomb squad determining that there was no bomb, The Alameda county sheriffs department claimed that he was carrying 'potentially dangerous materials and appeared to have made alterations to his boots, which were Unusually large and stuffed with layers of insoles.' The man told Transportation Security Administration officers that he's an artist and the watch is art."

Treason is usually specifically against the state, or the sovereign. Obama has acted within the legal frameworks of the US, although in some cases, that may be in dispute. Sometimes treason can mean a betrayal of trust, but most times in context when talking about a politician, it does not.

Traitor, OTOH, primarily means the betrayal of trust and/or a cause.

Obama was supposed to represent hope and change. That asshole betrayed us with FISA, the Patriot Act, the TSA bullshit, etc. Every single time there is a decision to be made that profoundly affects the civil rights of US citizens Obama betrays us.

Everything he said to get elected the first time was a lie.

I'm not a Romney supporter either. That man truly frightens me with this religious zealotry. Obama is helping to turn us into a police state, but at least when the secret police come for us, it won't be because of our beliefs in mythical beings in the sky. It will be because of our beliefs in freedom.

I don't know why you guys expect a constitutional lawyer to do anything other than maintain the status quo

I might expect him to be aware of the Fourth Amendment, along with the standard interpretation prior to the TSA that it's illegal for government agents to just blanket search everyone unless there's a specific identified threat of immediate concern. Before the TSA, when we were searched essentially by private screeners operated by the airlines, we consented to (limited) searches as part of a private commercial transaction -- if we refused to submit, we were just told we couldn't fly. Police or the FBI could only get involved if there were a reasonable suspicion to search further.

Now we have government agents doing invasive searches, and if you don't comply, you can be detained and arrested. That's exactly the kind of thing the Fourth Amendment was passed to avoid.

The interpretation of the Fourth Amendment changed suddenly and radically in the past decade, and I would expect a Constitutional lawayer to know something about it.

As regards globalization and the redistribution of American wealth, Obama is mostly a sucker, and a chump. Mittens, on the other hand, is an active player, pushing hard to enrich all the rest of the world at America's and Europe's expense.

You've got it wrong here -- Mitt is working hard to enrich himself. Any other beneficiaries of his actions, such as China's economy, are purely accidental. If Romney thought he could get as rich as quickly by creating jobs in the US, you can rest assured that he'd do just that. But for now, the US is still relatively close to (if not at) the top of the global economic pile, so any arbitrage to be made from outsourcing will negatively affect the US.

The terrorist/TSA paranoia very much did. He managed to push through the most significant change (per person dead). No catastrophe, even of larger proportions, has ever advanced us so far towards police state.

Your civil war numbers are very low, new estimates based on better ground penetrating radar finding mass gravesites push the number of military ONLY deaths up to 1 million

Civilian deaths are still unknown, but scaling to the Napoleonic Wars that would be one to two civilian deaths per combatant death due to direct action, population displacement, disease, food and water disruption.

It aligns well with the census data which shows the US should have grown in population much faster, 11-12m vrs the 9m recorded.

In a time of actual invasion or insurrection, the President can do a lot of things he can't otherwise do. Our founding founders knew this.

The closest we've come in the last 30 years on a national scale were the events involving the 9/11 hijackers before 9/11 and the unknown but thought to be very real and very high threat in the days after.

On a local scale, there have been some domestic "attacks on the United States" that would warrant Lincoln-esque restrictions on civil liberties in a very small geographic area - city blocks perhaps - for maybe a few hours at most. Had I been in downtown Oklahoma City in the hours before the Federal Building was bombed AND had the feds had specific, credible intelligence, I would forgive them if they denied me my right to be in that part of downtown during that time frame. But I'd demand they explain themselves later or I'd sue them for violating their oath of office, namely, to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Actually, a pair of boots stuffed with a few insoles sounds like a *perfect* place to keep a (fragile piece of art/ornate watch). Depending on the material of the boots, they could protect the watch from any mishandling of the luggage. Yes, he could have put the watch in a separate box, but that box would have taken up space on its own. This just sounds to me like efficient use of space.

As lhunath has already pointed out, the watch wasn't in the boots. But even it was in his boots, then it is not such an outrageous thing for him to do as you suggest. Shoes are a fashion item, and there have been plenty of novelty shoes made in the past. There have been shoes with LED lights and wheels that pop out turning them into skates. There was even a fad of having a tiny aquarium containing live goldfish in the heels of disco boots.

Corrections "McGann reportedly took off his watch while going through a security checkpoint at Terminal 2 about 7:45 p.m. and put it in the security bin along with his carry-on luggage". Now security added in this piece of utter bullshit, "covered it with his coat". The Whole idea of putting stuff in the security bin is to have it inspected, the order you put it in is arbitrary. The next bit "his boots were two sizes too big and they were stuffed with layers of home made insoles", "which allowed for large cavities where someone would be able to hide items". OK shit head security but was there actually anything hidden there.

Basically security fucked up and are now creating more and more bullshit to hide their fuck up. How far are those morons going to push it, right up to the dismissal in court and the smack down of an expensive law suit. Bunch of idiots trying to hide their incompetence in bureaucracy and bullshit.

PS avoid Huffington Post unless you are after full of hype and missing substantial detail like "being held Friday in Santa Rita Jail in Dublin in lieu of $150,000 bail". So a judge also joined in the parade of fuck ups.

This is the part I failed to read. They made a big fucking deal out of nothing,and are now trying to cover it up. Next time I should try rewarding comprehension, and reading TFA to get the actual details.

The fancy watch was a art project that resembled the Boston bomb scare more than a timepiece. I've not seen any pictures, but it was described as having "switches and resistors" and other electronic components. He had a watch that looked like a bomb timing device and did not look like a watch, and had extra space in his modified footwear sufficient to hold a bomb. I'm not clear on the complaints of whether the problem asserted is the execution of the rules (as was the Boston Bomb scare), or the rules the

Oh, really? And you know what a "bomb timing device looks like?" Methinks not.Get a few clues, eh? Resistors and switches, oddly enough, are part of rather a lot of electrical gadgets, like, say, cell phones and radios and computers. You're about as close to reality as the Boston cops who thought a Lite-Brite display was a bomb timer, because, well, all the bombs on TV have giant LED countdown timers.

Yes, if after they inspected it, determined that there was nothing harmful about it, as happened here.

We must have read different articles. In the article I read, they inspected it, determined that there was nothing wrong with it, then charged the guy with possessing materials to make an explosive device and locked him up anyway. Basically it's saving face. Just like in the Boston lite brite scare. The authorities don't want to look like over-reacting idiots, so it becomes even more important to them to charge the person with something. The people behind the Boston lite brite ads were brought up on bomb ho

Did you ever see a place with a picture of the watch in question? I saw a quote that it looked like a detonator, and he's still in custody for possessing "bomb making materials" but I haven't seen the device itself.

I did copy your previous post, after I replied to it and Slashdot for some reason deleted the whole article. I had saved a copy and reposted to help propagate this inportant example of TSA idiocy. I didn't give you credit because you're the kind of person that calls someone a plagiarist for simply reposting the existence and summary of a widely available news item. You plagiarist, you;)

I know this is headed for a -1, but when given the choice slashdot authors have always chosen the summaries that come from their buddies over everyone else. This is a tradition going right back Rob Malda himself. A summary of one of their buddies has to be pretty bad for them not to chose it over someone they don't know. It's a bit of the assholery that Slashdot was founded on.

Yes, I know. When I met Rom Malda personally he was an asshole to my face. He is smart but he is an asshole. That's the way it is.

It says "first time accepted submitter" because I've submitted before and been rejected, in my opinion because of liberal bias. A previous (unaccepted) post of mine noted that several major news networks had ignored a significant story reporting a study showing climactic temperature decline. Of course, with/. there is no discussion, no appeal. Only speedy, unexplained censorship.
P.S. I don't know Timothy.

NO! The judgement is complete once they found no trace of explosive materials
Having wires on you or wearing thick shoes is absolutely no reason for being detained. Even if he had an actual bomb timer, that's nothing without a bomb

From the article, it seems as if the TSA did the safe thing and called the bomb squad, which I guess is the right thing to do. I don't expect the guy at the checkpoint to be able to decide if the "modified" watch is dangerous or not, and so they called in the experts (who decided that there were no explosives).

What bothers me is that he was then arrested: "McGann was taken to Santa Rita Jail in Dublin where he was charged with possessing materials to make an explosive device" (emphasis mine). Isn't that too broad a charge? I'm sure every household has material that could conceivably be used to make an explosive device. Is everyone a threat now (in an actual enforceable sense, not in a we-assume-everyone-is-guilty sense)?

It's interesting to draw a comparison between this guy making his own watch as an "art project" and Woz's Nixie tube watch [youtube.com] which he says he has worn on flights. Did the TSA just let Woz through because he was Woz?

Yes. As long as "loser" stays a perjorative with implied stigma and/or a license to be treated as anything less than an average human being, they will be, for the simple reason that for one winner there will always be several losers, thus making the average person a loser. That current society requires 99 losers for 1 winner simply makes that more so.

It was the 1% that declared war on the 99%, not the other way around.

You don't see 1 in 100 people being able to walk through without scrutiny.

Of course you don't, they don't take the regular flights but have private jets. Which would be fine by itself, it's not that much of a burden on other people, but it's not enough for them. They're never happy as long as anyone else has anything at all.

I was traveling from LAX to New Orleans to shoot Bit Momma's House 2 (you remember that, don't you?) After some bad experiences checking baggage, I carried on my supplies, including my tracking kit.

Now, my tracking kit was a small Pelican case filled with watch batteries, short wires, and LEDs. After it went through the X-Ray machine, the TSA agent looked at the screen, looked at me, looked at the screen, then picked up the box. He carefully unlatched it, and held it out *as far as he could* as he opened it, turning his head away and looking through the corners of his eyes.

faced with a budget surplus and a terrorism deficit, the Oakland Airport TSA spring into action and arrest the most suspicious thing they can come up with after 3 red bulls and a half dozen cruellers: a 50 year old white man with a nice watch and a pair of comfy shoes.

freedom has been preserved once more thanks to the watchful eye of a handful of overweight highschool drop-outs in cheap polyester slacks and clip-on ties....but for how long?

tune in for an exciting conclusion to next weeks "Security theatre." Will the man in the comfy shoes buy a new, even more dastardly ornate watch with his lawsuit payout? What devious new orthopaedics will our nemesis equip himself with next? All this and more will be revealed in, "episode 25: I elected obama twice, this shits not funny anymore"

I had this device [hylobatidae.org] discovered in my backpack during a TSA extra-gropey our-explosives-detector-machine-has-beeped secondary inspection. It was powered down, but it actually is a hacked-together, home-made gadget for triggering an external unit [flickr.com].

The TSA agents responsible were grumbling about having to work next to the ineffectual backscatter X-ray scanners (I'd opted out), and were interested in what camera equipment I had and what I'd recommend for a beginner. Many of the agents are human, and sick to death of the security theatre they have to work with.

(As a photographer who likes taking pictures [flickr.com] of weird bits of crumbling infrastructure, I've had plenty of run-ins with security guards and the like. Oddly, I've never been arrested.)

Those aren't bomb materials. Those are, at best, timer-making materials and a place to conceal something.

Yeah, sure, if the guy's got ammonium nitrate and kerosene in his carry-on, those would be bomb-making materials. Go ahead and arrest him for that.

But if you're going to start arresting people for stuff that can be part of a bomb without actually being dangerous, you should start by taking away everyone's cell phone. Not only do they all have timer functions now, but they can, and have, been used as remote triggers.

and in retaliation they charge the guy with a real crime. He should set up a donation site so we can donate to his legal fund so he can stir up moire shit. Now for those will will spout the If you got nothing to hide... Well he had nothing to hide yet the authorities still railroaded him.

Anybody who's read or watched 1960s spy stories knows how to make a detonation timer with an ordinary watch or analog clock. You scrape the paint of one of the hands and position a bare wire on the face so it completes the circuit at the desired time. So the argument the cops are making that the watch was capable of triggering a bomb means exactly nothing. Anything capable of marking the passage of time can be adapted to trigger a bomb. You could rig a trigger with an hour glass if you wanted to.

Not only analog watches, digital watches are even easier, set the alarm for a specific time, and connect to the buzzer...

Of course he wasn't arrested because he had a big ridiculouse watch, he was arrested because he made someone look stupid when the bomb squad showed up and couldn't find a bomb... the law for "making an authority figure look bad" isn't written down anywhere, but it is one of the crimes that is guaranteed to get you arrested almost every single time.

America used to be the greatest nation of tinkerers and inventors in the world. Now we're a nation of consumers. The ability and inclination to create things is now considered prima facia evidence of anti-social tendencies.

There's recently been an Internet-driven renaissance of inventing things -- the maker movement. But there's something sinister about the movement. It's *international*. Consider the Arduino. It was developed in the *commune* of Ivrea Italy, and the design is the property of *nobody*. The Trilateral Commission is probably behind it, assisted by the socialist Obama administration.

People who know more than you are scary. People who know more than you *cooperating* with each other is scarier still.

The watch was covered in wires, fuses, switches, etc, and his boots were quite large as if to convey there is something inside them. Come on now. Do you really believe he was just innocently passing through security, completely oblivious to the suspicion that was going to be levied against him when anyone in the airport looked at him? Really?

It's a publicity stunt. Whether or not I think that should be enough to arrest a man (I don't), it should have been obvious to him from the start that it was going to b

The police near me would have recently filled all available cells with people travelling by train to a Science Fiction convention if it was standard procedure to arrest anyone that was wearing weird stuff. I'm sure he wanted to attract some attention by his costume but I doubt he wanted it from the TSA.

The point is people wearing weird shit shouldn't be enough of an excuse to lock them up after the bomb squad has been and gone. One person's normal can be another person's weird shit, and an odd watch plus big boots is probably a lot less weird than some of the stuff I've seen teenage girls wearing in airports.

I hear that there's a vast conspiracy to load up every airplane that flies with a highly flammable and explosive material, that sometimes this material even makes up the bulk of the weight of the aircraft in flight. It's everywhere on the plane and people doesn't even realize it, even stored in vast quantities inside the wings of most commercial airliners. The rumor I heard, and I know this sounds a bit outlandish, is that it's even pumped into the engines, where it's actually very common for it to cause small explosions that most people don't even realize or think about.

The thought of it scared me so much that I decided that I would only drive places in my car instead.

But do YOU realize there's an even bigger conspiracy to load all cars, including yours, with an even more explosive fluid? And that it's also pumped through the engine where it causes explosions?Think about it, man, and ditch your booby-trapped car. I have a bike I could sell you.

Any wire will do, including your phone charger, or the spare cat 5 wire you always carry in your computer bag,earbuds for your phone, the phone itself, etc.

ANY wire constitutes bomb making equipment.

The fact that he was a short dude and wanted to be taller and used multiple insoles to achieve that is alsosomehow a crime.

We still have to entertain the possibility that he got exactly what he was looking for, notoriety and fame.

Who builds a watch with wires and "fuses" hanging out of it and then walks thru airport security?Really, who does that?

Fools and idiot attention seekers. Any terrorist would be much more clever. The charges leveled areprobably simply to hold him on till they dig through his life. When released, he will probably try to sellhis watches to other fools based on his new found fame.

The only fools are the people who support the TSA and their actions. When the free thinkers are all on lockdown, there will be nobody to stand up for your right to express your opinion on issues like this.

Who builds a watch with wires and "fuses" hanging out of it and then walks thru airport security?
Really, who does that? Fools and idiot attention seekers.

How far have we fallen that slashdot readers are asking that?

Who does that? Nerds. Nerds do that. Incredible nerds like Steve Wozniak [youtube.com] for example.

People wear things I find to be ridiculous all the time that everyone has no problem labeling as fashion statements. But if it's wires and fuses, it can't be a statement of the types of things you enjoy, it has to be an idiot attention seeker?

Personally, I find it much more easy to label people idiots when they think every exposed wire and fuse is a bomb.

"Who builds a watch with wires and "fuses" hanging out of it and then walks thru airport security?Really, who does that?"

steampunk?

mabey he is, but the TSA and local PD does itself no favors giving every dolt looking for free publicity, all the free publicity they want.

The "filfthy speech movement", made a career out of taunting the government into enforcing useless legislation to get the populace behind them, as did howard stern, and the legacy of the shock jock. The irony is, that, authorities, like a monkey with its hand on a grape nut in a trap, could let go and free itself anytime they want, but they never learn.

The FBI campaign against so called "radicals" on california university campuses made heros and legends out of the mundane, and wasted FBI resources, destroyed the credbility of the federal governement, and ultimately let the real communists get the bomb, and let the mafia grow uncontrolled, by diverting resources towards harmless protestors who didn't not result in putting away serious threats to the nation.

Mabey a few more idiots need to make fortunes before they catch on. All they are doing is degrading the reputation of the TSA, not catching any real terrorists(who take the efforts), and just repeating historical failures.

Who builds a watch with wires and "fuses" hanging out of it and then walks thru airport security?Really, who does that?

You're right, but only in this very refined case. About 10 years ago I built a noise cancelling system out of a microphone, some electronics and I was young so it all looked very home made. It worked well, almost as well as the Bose QuietComfort series headphones. Flying was a real treat with my custom contraption on. Yet now I suddenly can't take it through airport security for fear of me not actually getting to my destination.

There are documented cases of artists, students, professionals, teachers, vendors with tech equipment, and likely more all having major problems with airport security for the same reason, they dared to build something.

This guy may be a fool and an attention seeker, but many others aren't.

He could be in hot water if the US attorney decides to prosecute him for hoaxing under the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 [wikipedia.org]. You know the security theater that makes travel so miserable is not benign. Poke the Homeland Security rattlesnake wrong and feel the fangs. Make a bad joke, or deliberately carry crap to stimulate negative attention, and you may get a lot more than you bargained for.. We see stories all the time about people going through hell even when they made some innocent mistake.

The people doing this work are under trained and under qualified. They have a lot of power in a limited space. There is stress. And a statistically small, but measurable, threat. Personally I think airport security should be handled much differently. But until they put me in charge of the world the airport gauntlet is pathetic a fact of life. Frankly, with Mr Insole I sense a little mental illness. Hopefully somebody will make the right call. Hopefully the bureaucracy will cut this guy a break. But if the authorities detect that he is a wise ass they might throw the book at him.

My formula for passing through the looking glass? I keep my wise mouth shut. I wear good quality sweats. No belt. In a quiet corner before I get in the security line I empty all my pockets. Including top pockets. Everything goes in my backpack.( Even receipts trigger backscatter.) I feel for coins. Everything. Usually the scan goes smoothly and I avoid being frisked or wanded so I can quickly snag my backpack off the belt. Then I take another quiet moment to reassemble my belongings. As I do so I often ponder the irony that 30,000 people a year die in cars in the US alone. So that if this was really about saving lives we would have declared 'war' on Toyota and Ford long ago. It is a Franz Kafka world and that's a fact. Maybe one day I'll be offered a political choice in this matter. But to date no major party offers to ratchet this crap back. Not even a little. Sigh.

I don't like the situation the way it is, and I'm sure that there could be more sanity around the whole issue, but I also think that what they do is not completely without merit and I do kinda understand where they're coming from. The TSA shouldn't engage in assholery with people who they are responsible for protecting. Most sane people wouldn't arrest someone because they're wearing the jewelry of their choice. But then TSA agents on a power jag think it's perfectly fine to engage in such stupidity in support of security theater.

Probably more "fool" then attention seeker, but it should be a wake-up call that anyone who wants to travel should know better than to wear a piece of art around lest you tick off security check points.

You suggest 300+ million Americans should self-censor in order to placate the TSA.I suggest that XY,000 TSA agents learn how to do their jobs better.

But to arrest him after the bomb squad said, "No danger"? What's the point? If the bomb squad had been worried about it, Ok, there's justification. This is just the cops being assholes because they can. Cops are not there to teach us lessons, or punish bad fashion sense. Either the guy was dangerous, had illegal materials, or indicated that he had intent to cause harm, or the cops were wrong to arrest him. I can find quite a few things wrong with just about every person I meet: if I were a cop, should I be able to arrest them for that?

Gee let me wear this contraption that will garner all sorts of attention.
I can understand someones desire to express his art but to do it in an airport with TSA screeners who are basically highschool push outs is just fucking stupid.

I disagree with you. It is true that he could expect to be searched and tested for explosives for wearing a strange watch. But I still would not expect him to be detained after a further inspection had found no explosives on him. Also, is he an idiot for wearing thick-soled shoes to the airport as well?

He's doing a valuable service to us -- pointing out how ridiculous things got. A charge of "having wires that may be used to make a bomb" (in a McGyver episode) is now enough to be detained and taken out o

The 'shoe bomber' didn't have a BOMB in his shoe, the whole story was made up by our Jewish 'masters' to give them even more excuses to take naked photographs of us using their TSA scanners.

Strange. I just checked my copies of IJC Monthly (part of what I get for my dues in the International Jewish Conspiracy) for the time around when that guys was arrested and there's no mention of us making that up. I'll bring it up at the next meeting as we're plotting our next "Drinking Christian baby blood" party.

IF there truly are any "moderate" muslims (the politically-correct people keep telling us these moderates are the vast majority) then they should have wrapped-up and solved the whole "extremist" thing long ago...

Muslims are not a monolithic group. There are many sects and subgroups. Just like Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Taoists, Hindus, Sikhs, etc. there are Muslims of all stripes. Including those that are just as bigoted as you. Why don't you go and make all the various sects of whatever bullshit religion (and they all are) you subscribe to play nice? Here in the US we probably have them all beat, as some have observed: